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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23252575">This Never-Ending Melody</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/catlike/pseuds/catlike'>catlike</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Doctor Who, Doctor Who &amp; Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst with a Happy Ending, Clara never truly leaves him, F/M, whouffaldi, whouffle</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-03-21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-03-21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-01 16:21:42</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,585</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23252575</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/catlike/pseuds/catlike</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>The memory of what Clara told him in the cloisters lives on in the form of a song, its melody always winding its way through the back of his mind, soft and sweet and sad and ever-constant, like the cadence of his twin heartbeats.</p><p>He just wishes he could remember the words that went with it.</p><p>(Or: Several instances the Doctor plays a song called <i>Clara</i>.)</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>The Doctor &amp; Clara Oswin Oswald, The Doctor (Doctor Who)/Clara Oswin Oswald, Twelfth Doctor &amp; Clara Oswin Oswald, Twelfth Doctor/Clara Oswin Oswald</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>120</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>This Never-Ending Melody</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>He’s in a diner somewhere in America. There’s dust on his shoes and a guitar in his hands, and the last place he remembers being is at the end of a burning universe. He can recall falling to the floor, remember the feeling of his two hearts shattering at the sight of a girl crying over him, and him asking her to smile, for her sake as much as his.</p><p>(He thinks....he thinks she might’ve smiled for him. That she <i>must’ve</i> smiled for him.</p><p>But he can’t remember it.)</p><p>Now he sits on a barstool, in this kitschy American diner with records on the walls and Elvis painted on the door, and a surprisingly British waitress standing behind the counter, with kind brown eyes and a clever smile. She crosses her arms on the countertop, leans toward him as he talks, and for a reason he can’t quite put his finger on, she feels comfortingly familiar to talk to.</p><p>He must be lonely, he thinks, shaking his head. </p><p>It’s not like he’s ever seen her before.</p><p> As he stares at her, he hears a song playing somewhere in the back of his mind and he plucks it out slowly on his guitar, fingers dancing deftly across the strings. He’s not quite sure where the tune comes from; it’s both brand new and old, comforting and haunting, melodic and melancholy. But it’s something he somehow knows as well as he knows the sound of his own two hearts beating.</p><p>The waitress listens, dark brown eyes watching his hands, and then she asks, “What’s the song called?”</p><p>He looks up, the tips of his fingers ghosting over the guitar strings, and says:</p><p>“I think it’s called Clara.”</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>#</p>
</div>“You said memories become stories when we forget them,” the waitress tells him later, after he’s confessed he can’t remember what Clara told him in the cloisters. “Maybe some of them become songs.”<p>He thinks she sounds sad when she says it, and he thinks it might be because she knows what it feels like to lose someone too. He’s been around the universe long enough to know what grief looks like the instant he sees it, and it’s right there in her eyes when she looks at him, along with something else he can’t quite place. He wonders if maybe she’s saying that part about memories becoming songs for her own benefit as much as his.</p><p>He thinks that whoever she’s thinking of, whomever she’s lost, she must’ve loved them very much.</p><p>And in reply, he strums his guitar and says, “That would be nice.”</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>#</p>
</div>The years pass and things change. He gets a job lecturing at a university, parks his TARDIS in his office, stops running so far and so fast.<p>But the melody remains, its volume ebbing in and out like waves of the sea, sometimes quiet, sometimes loud. From time to time, he’ll hear the song playing brightly, right at the forefront of his mind. It’ll happen when he passes by an English teacher’s classroom, or when the café next door starts advertising soufflés. Sometimes it happens when he laughs, or before he falls asleep, whenever he’s happy or even when he’s sad, but it’s there.</p><p>It’s always, always, <i>always</i> there, this lyricless melody. Forever playing. Never leaving him.</p><p>He doesn’t think he ever wants it to.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>#</p>
</div>It’s late-afternoon sometime in the twenty-first century, and he’s in his office at Saint Luke’s University. He’s already graded several papers - three good ones he’s marked with an A, and a bad one he simply wrote <i>pudding brain</i> in circular Gallifreyan on - so now he takes a break, standing and slipping his guitar strap over his shoulders. His fingers fall across the strings, and lost in thought, he moves to stand beneath his office’s old ruby and sapphire stained-glass window, a mosaic of blues and reds reflecting across his silhouette as he plays.<p>“That song,” he hears someone behind him say, and slightly startled, he turns to see a woman with a wastebasket - one of the university’s janitors - standing in the doorway. “It’s pretty.”</p><p>He blinks. He’d been playing almost unconsciously, like the music was all muscle memory as his mind wandered elsewhere, so it takes him a moment to recall exactly what song he’d been strumming, and then he remembers:</p><p>He was playing <i>that</i> song again. That song that never leaves him, the one he first played to a waitress in a retro American diner and hasn’t really stopped playing since.</p><p>He nods, a pattern of blue and red shadows moving across his face as he does, “I suppose it is.”</p><p>“I’m surprised you were playing it.”</p><p>He squints at her, eyebrows furrowing, “Why?”</p><p>The janitor shrugs her shoulders, “It’s just that you always play rock songs, that’s what you’re known for. But this song...this song’s so <i>different</i> than anything else you ever play.”</p><p>The Doctor supposes that she’s right. He likes loud songs, hard rock and guitar riffs and fast drumbeats that echo the rhythm of his two hearts after an adrenaline rush. Songs to run from Sontarans to. Songs to shoot through space to. Songs that drown out all the other lives he’s led and all the other voices in his head.</p><p>But this song he plays now is slow and soft and sweet and sad, and always winding its way through the back of his mind. He doesn’t always know exactly <i>why</i> he’s playing it, or sometimes that he’s even started to play it at all, just that it’s something he does.</p><p>The janitor stares at him, interrupting his thoughts once more as she asks, ”Does it have words?”</p><p>He knows that it used to, once upon a time, when he knelt in the cloisters with a girl he once knew but no longer does. She’d told him something important, but he can’t remember it, not a single sentence, not even a word. The melody remains lyricless, the words he wants always just beyond his grasp, forever dancing just out of his reach.</p><p>“No,” he answers. “No words. Not anymore.”</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>#</p>
</div>“What’s it called?” A new student asks, like they all inevitably do. The semesters pass and his students change, but the song remains like a constant companion, and so that question does too.<p>“Clara,” he answers, and her name feels at home on his lips.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>#</p>
</div>The night air is warm, but the breeze is cool. There’s a party going on in the courtyard of Saint Luke’s as the students and staff of the university celebrate the end of another semester, and the Doctor stands under a lit-up, glittering tree, it’s branches woven with white string-lights, and he plays his guitar in its glow.<p>And then he spots her.</p><p>It’s that waitress from that diner in the desert.</p><p>She’s walking by, and he catches a glimpse of her out of the corner of his eye. She’s wearing that same nearly TARDIS blue dress as before, half covered with an apron, its stark white strings flying behind her like wings as she walks.</p><p>“You, Diner Girl!” he says suddenly.</p><p>(He’s doesn’t really know why he calls out to her, nor does he quite understand why his two hearts beat gratefully when she stops.</p><p>Maybe it’s because he’s been without a companion for so long.)</p><p>Diner Girl turns toward him, and he doesn’t really expect her to recognize him - after all, he only spent about an hour with her, a few years ago, just one of a million customers who must’ve come into her diner and sat on that stool - but she smiles at him like he’s an old friend. </p><p>“Hi,” she says as she steps toward him, the sparkling lights shining down across her smile like stars.</p><p>He raises an eyebrow, not sure whether she really remembers him or is simply feigning politeness. Something about her posture suggests that she’s lying. “You remember me?”</p><p>“‘Course I do. You’re the man who played me a melody for a glass of lemonade,” she says. Then gently, quietly, so nearly noiseless he almost doesn’t catch it, she adds, “I don’t think I could ever forget you.”</p><p>So she <i>does</i> remember him. He must‘ve been wrong about her lying about something, he thinks. It’s hard to tell, sometimes, with humans, the odd, emotional creatures that they are.</p><p>She brings him back out of his thoughts by flashing him a smile that boarders on flirtatious as she says, “Bit surprised you remember me, though.”</p><p>“Never forget a face,” he banters back, but even as the words leave his lips, he knows it’s a lie.</p><p>There’s one face out there that he just can’t remember, no matter how hard he tries. </p><p>The waitress looks stricken for a second, like some sort of old wound she thought had long since scarred over has reopened, all painful and raw, but the look’s gone in an instant; she wipes it away with a shake of her head, her brown ponytail bobbing with movement as she does.</p><p>“So this is what you do, is it?” She asks, smiling as she gestures around at the school, looking just a little bit proud although he has no idea why she would. ”You teach here?”</p><p>”I lecture. What are <i>you</i> doing here?” </p><p>“Catering,” she answers easily, motioning down at her uniform. “What, you thought I dressed as a waitress for no reason?”</p><p>He shrugs. Human nuances like fashion sense were lost on him. “People have worn odder. You should see some of the outfits I’ve picked out.”</p><p>She raises an eyebrow at that, presses her lips together like she’s trying not to smile, and the Doctor asks, “So you’ve come back home from America?” </p><p>She shrugs, ”Oh, you know how it is. Can’t stay in one place too long.”</p><p>“I know the feeling.”</p><p>“Bet you do.”</p><p>She grins at him then, and he grins back at her, and as he does, his fingers begin to pluck out four familiar notes on his old guitar. </p><p>Diner Girl blinks, her lips parting for just a moment. She remembers the tune, he realizes, he can see the recognition and surprise register in her eyes at the sound of it. He watches as her gaze floats down to the guitar in his hands, and then flickers back up to his face as she says, “Still playing that song, huh?”</p><p>“Always.”</p><p>“You ever remember anything this Clara told you?”</p><p>“Not a word.”</p><p>She nods, and she looks sad, like she’s a breath away from breaking down, and something inside him twists, all raw and painful. He can’t stand the sight of tears, especially not tears from this girl. It’s nonsensical, this reaction of his. It’s not like she’s his friend, it’s not like he even really knows her, but for some reason he feels that if this tiny, brunette girl standing in front of him cries, it just might break his two hearts.</p><p>“I can play a song for you, if you’d like,” he offers, because he can’t deny this strange impulse that wants him to do anything to get her to smile again.</p><p>“In exchange for a lemonade?”</p><p>“No,” he says, shrugging and shaking his head, the pads of his fingers brushing against the guitar strings. “Just because.”</p><p>She stares, searches his eyes, and then something in him sighs with relief as he sees a smile playing on the corner of her lips.</p><p>“Keep playing me that song, then,” she orders cheekily, her eyes sparkling as her smile widens and she nods at his guitar. “You started it, might as well finish it.”</p><p>So he obeys and keeps playing, the song drifting through the air, floating softly on the breeze, and though it’s stupid and sentimental and certainly nonsensical, for a moment he feels like it’s as if Clara’s there with him.</p><p>Finally, he reaches the final part of the song, the last note lingering in the night, and then, quick as lightning, the waitress stands on the tips of her toes and presses a kiss to his cheek. Before he has a chance to react, to exhale, to wonder why she would, she’s <i>gone.</i></p><p>She had catering work to get back to, he supposes.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>#</p>
</div>He questions once, when he’s playing it for what may be the thousandth time, how he can know this untaught song so well.<p>And the answer he gives himself is:</p><p>He knows the song so well because it’s <i>Clara,</i> and what Clara told him in the cloisters, and she’s woven into his mind and two hearts so deeply that not even Time Lord technology can fully take her away.</p><p>He may not remember the sound of her laugh or the shade of her eyes, but he remembers how she made him feel and the lessons she taught him, and here they all are, wrapped up in the form of a wordless song that never leaves him.</p><p>He just wishes he’d never forgotten the lyrics that go with it.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>#</p>
</div>The year is nineteen-fourteen and he is on a battlefield that is not a battlefield, standing beneath a snow-filled sky.<p>And he is dying.</p><p>It’s nothing new, this dying thing. He’s died oh so many times before. From one regeneration to the next, and then all those billions of times he burned himself up in the confession dial. Still, dying is not something you can get used to, and he finds himself hesitating, lingering in this life before he goes onto the next, trying to find some sort of semblance of peace.</p><p>The glass creature made of memories that’s there with him must sense it, because she says, “I’ve got a little goodbye present for you.”</p><p>He scoffs at that, starts to make a joke, reply with the wit and wisdom that only dying men hold, but then his words fall silent and his breath catches beneath his collarbone, because <i>Clara</i> is standing in front of him.</p><p>And he <i>recognizes</i> her.</p><p>The air is cool and the sky is grey, but there’s this glow around Clara, all golden and soft, and when she looks up at him, the world feels a little less cold.</p><p>She smiles, warm and clever and bright, and there it is again: that song that’s always playing in the back of his mind.</p><p>“<i>Clara</i>,” he says softly, gently, a smile coming across his face at stares at her, and he hears the melody grow louder and sweeter.</p><p>“Hello, you stupid, old man,” she says, and there’s no mistaking the fondness in her voice as she says it, nor the love in her eyes she has when she looks at him, and he thinks he’s never seen or heard anything more beautiful.</p><p>He ducks his head, laughs at her loving insult, and bit by bit, his memories come back to him: the sound of her voice and then the flash of her smile. The way he felt when her arms wrapped around him and then the way he grinned at her jokes. How she was the waitress who told him that sometimes memories become songs, and then how she’d checked in on him without him ever knowing he was talking to her, to <i>his</i> Clara, and then and then and <i>then</i>...</p><p>Then comes what she told him in the cloisters.</p><p>It’s all back, every single sentence, each and every word, and those words that she said settle in his mind like stardust, sparkling and gentle, bright and beautiful. And he smiles, because finally, finally, <i>finally</i>, after all these years...</p><p>The melody in his mind has <i>lyrics</i>.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Was Hell Bent half a decade ago? Yes. Am I over it yet? No.</p><p>If you like what I wrote, come find me on tumblr (username: clara-oswin-oswald) where I’m likely to be found screaming about Whouffle/Whouffaldi.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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